Sermons in “Essentials of Christianity”

What would it look like for us to live this story of Jesus in our lives? It would be like a prelude to heaven. Life isn’t about fulfilling arbitrary rules, it’s about being empowered for future living today.

We put ourselves in the hands of a power we thought would free us but only enslaved us and we don’t have the ability to set ourselves free. To do this we cut ourselves off from the only one who has the power to help — what are we going to do? Look up, he has come to rescue us.

In the course of this series we have affirmed that we are people created by God in his love for us and we have said that we live in God’s intentionally good creation that he has placed us over as stewards to reflect his image into it, causing it to flourish, and gathering up the praises of all creation and offering them back to God in worship. It begs the question, if God has made things so good why are things so bad? What’s our problem?

Once we know who we are, we need to know where we are and how we answer that question determines a lot about how we live. The world we live in is neither junk nor divine, but good because it is made by the same God who made us in his image. That means our relationship between the creation and God is full of purpose!

Who Are We? It’s an essential question that everyone asks because we have a sense that we need a purpose — we need value. Christianity has an answer to this fundamental human question: we are loved by God.

All of us who are Christians are responsible for sharing our faith with the people around us, but many of us feel unequipped to do that. This series looks at the essentials of our faith using four worldview questions. Yet at the heart of the call is to first and foremost live a questionable life.